


Divergence

by rosekay



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: 5+1 Things, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Bond is an equal-opportunity slut, Curiosity killed Q, Dubious Consent, F/M, Genderswap, M is a fan of poems and poetic endings alike, M/M, Porn, Violence, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-11-21
Updated: 2013-02-16
Packaged: 2017-11-19 04:31:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/569120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosekay/pseuds/rosekay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five things that Q learns about five Bonds and one thing he does not know about any of them. Canon-AUs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Honeypot

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bond has a specialty. Q has disdain.

i. honeypot

***

When Q was fifteen, a classmate called him something vividly unpleasant and also saw fit to scrawl it somewhere highly visible. This was what passed for ingenuity in his mind. Q did his due diligence and destroyed a good percentage of his father’s portfolios, an incident which launched what he later learned was the first of MI6’s files on him.

He has, in a stroke of efficiency, curtailed those types of interactions by dint of working on the very edge of national security. Human intelligence, as Q branch likes to opine, is on its way out, and good riddance, as far as he's concerned. The world is more complicated place than messy tangles of flesh and missed communications.

The very idea of the honey trap is a relic he associates with swallows and ravens and Soviets. He's still shocked there are specialists walking the halls, least of all specialists who are failed 00 agents. Q is not immune from the accusations of his squeamish public school tastes, so he reins in his surprise at the craggy contours of Bond’s features. Even having reviewed some of the video footage, where his coloring and bearing were plain, Q had somehow imagined a leaner, more effete creature, with intelligent dark eyes and a faster smile. 

The grin that forms out of the worn, tightly held mouth is slow-burning and vaguely predatory, the eyes an arresting shade that glow like ice chips in his face. He gives Q a frank appraisal that slides with unsettling ease into bland professionalism. A computer program, he says drily, vowels crisp, can't figure out where a man's cock wants to go. But it can kill, says Q, and Bond's eyes go utterly blank.

M, Q knows, has no particular investment in Bond outside of a vague flavor of disappointment, not after he couldn't close the deal in Montenegro and was taken back out of 00 duties, but they build him up like a favorite son, a perfect target for Silva's fascination and resentment. He seems like no weapon at all against a man of Silva's considerable competence, but he seduces Silva's woman easily enough (later he will tell Q, neck bared to Q's eyes as he mouths his collarbone, with just a touch of regret coloring his voice, that it was her terror and not Bond's charms that made the gambit work--they were one of a kind after all, and Bond would know.)

Q listens with some apprehension when they bring him in to Silva's island. The cameras embedded in Bond's unnecessary contacts manage to squeeze off a few shots of Silva's setup (intimidating to view but certainly not where he keeps his best equipment judging by the ghastly amount of dust and decay) before Silva coolly puts a clever little blade within a centimeter of Bond's eye and asks him if he would rather have the camera or the whole eye out.

Q can't see Bond's smile but he can feel the place in the conversation where it would slot in (to Bond), quite naturally. He’s down to one sense now, one sense to ascertain if this gambit will work or fail spectacularly. And Bond’s low voice stutters out, "Please, God." It's so alien to Bond's usual lackadaisical demeanor that Q hardly recognizes the rough desperation in it. He can hear the push of Silva’s breath, how close he comes to Bond’s face.

“She’s thrown you away too,” he says in his oddly rounded voice.

“Yes,” breathes Bond, so convincingly Q’s throat is locked tight. He can mark each touch by hitches in Bond’s breathing. He can imagine Silva stripping him in every sense of the word, taking his time from collar to groin, headless of the henchman standing guard, the unhappy delight in his murmured imprecations as he works Bond’s cock. In the lab, he is coated in sweat and hard, lower belly tense and a wire-hot pain in the back of his neck. To relax seems as distant and absurd swimming the Channel.

It’s a masterful performance, and Q has to unlock each muscle tensed like a loaded spring to process the wet sounds of what must be a kiss. This is it, he is unable to stop thinking, waiting five heartbeats for Bond smoothly transferring the cyanide tooth (brutally simple, some of Q’s best work, designed to stay in under inspection, and slip out with the right trick of tongue) to Silva’s mouth, the vicious-sounding headbutt that triggers his bite reflex, the agonizing sounds of choking and frothing. The other half of his M-scarred face collapsing (this is not a sound that Q can hear, but he feels it--they have done their due diligence). Whatever ruined message he whispers to Bond isn’t caught by the audio. It’s for Bond alone.

When Q asks later, eyes fixed on the bite mark right below Bond’s collarbone, a hair's breadth above his shrapnel scar, with Bond’s eyes, striking and untouchable as ever, straying distractedly to Q’s own mouth, Bond shrugs and doesn’t even dignify him with a response.


	2. Jane

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 007 likes new things in her hand, and Q is no exception.

ii. jane

***

007 is more at home in a beautifully tailored suit than a daring gown, and it's in one of these, rather exquisitely cut so the lean breadth of her shoulders becomes intriguing instead of intimidating, that she occupies, more gracefully than she does the bench at the National Gallery. At a little over six years, she carries one of the longest tenures on record for a female 00 agent, and Q expected her to have better posture. She has the slumped, slightly ruined grandeur of badly preserved statuary. When he leads the conversation about the Turner, she gives him a particular look of disbelief that sends him back to a confused boyhood and early, fumbled rejections with frightening alacrity. He masters himself well enough though, carrying forward with the introductions and handing over the case. It is infuriating how much her wry look of approval at his rejoinder about exploding pens buoys him.

In Montenegro, they'd needed her to be distracting--Q has seen his predecessor's files, the photographs, the designs, the footage. That daring gown had been in her usual style, sleek and black and unforgiving, with a striking high collar that made her eyes stand out like jewels and no back to speak of, only a frame for each brutally delineated muscle. She’s no real beauty when one takes a closer look, a face that wears its years, ears that stand out from her head a little, usually only given a little shelter by the practical chignon she pins her ashy hair into. Not a romantic blonde like Q had read about growing up, but a drained, minimalist color that reminds him of funerals and soft gray skies. She’d stood out like a particularly brutal Picasso to Lynd’s willowy Degas, but Q can’t keep his eyes off of her in the photographs, and, according to the reports, neither could the other players. The black, he notes while reviewing the case, had been useful for hiding signs of exertion during the between-hand altercations. 

She left a shocking amount out of her report--Q suspects Lynd had left more of an impression than she would admit--but she’d obediently attracted the French Algerian as asked, assuming the correct note of vulnerability, of curiosity, false pique against Vesper, already discarded like so much offal by her masters. His blood runs hot and cold beneath his skin at the way she’d dispatched the man, tightening the cord of his own love knot, slowly and with precision, until he’d wet himself, heels kicking, face bloating. It was an ugly way to go.

Q says as much when he finds her waiting in his flat after the Silva affair, and startles a laugh out of her. She wears something woodsy and masculine at her wrists, but it softens the longer he inhales it.

“Your first?” she jokes. “Don’t worry, the second one’s--”

He catches her mouth, dry, expecting him, before she can finish. She pulls back and puts a hand to his cheek. It’s square but feminine and long-fingered, frighteningly capable as he knows, and frighteningly limited. She is giving him the sort of considering look that made him lash out at every superior until he hit Q branch running.

“You really are just a boy, aren’t you?” No mockery in her voice, which makes it worse. He bites her lip for that. Another laugh, and a cold hand slipping under his sweater to curl around his ribs. She could snap his bones, and he ludicrously hardens at the thought.

She takes off his glasses and places puts them on the side table with clinical efficiency, dipping her head--she tops him by a few centimeters that should sting but don’t--to give him a brutal little nip beneath the jaw.

“Beautiful.” Said in the tone one might use for an elegantly crafted watch, or a gun.

He pushes her for that, and she clearly allows the fall onto the bed, her eyes lifted up in challenge. When he goes down with her, her grip on his wrists is iron, her mouth hot on his collarbone. She brings one hand up to her own face, brushing knuckles with her lips, so lightly that the hairs rise, and he shivers. He has to close his eyes when she closes her mouth over a finger, hint of teeth, hard enough to make him jerk a little, and guides his hand to her waist, where her shirt is already untucked.

Clothes, to Q, have always been unutterably awkward in the bedroom, more physical geometry in the way of what should be simple mathematics, but 007 makes it rough and effortless all at once, skimming herself out of her trousers, so his eyes are drawn to the elegantly cut muscle of her thighs, and when he’s distracted, world dull enough without his glasses anyway, she has shirt off, his belt being undone in one hand, a whirl with flashes of skin, teeth, a teasing murmur about his never seeing the sun.

Knew she always wanted a daughter, Silva had said bitterly, but Q has seen 007 standing shoulder to shoulder with M, taller than the other woman by a head, rangy where M had been rounded and petite, face rather brutal where M had retained some beauty of bone that had once served her--Q knows this--quite well in a different era of spies. Her eyes are steely in a different manner. She is a weapon, not a wielder, would never be the successor Silva had decided she was, a superior heir to be toppled, and she toppled him, nothing Q gave her in the end, just a weapon she could have used had they been gladiators in an ancient ring. It is disgusting. It makes him claw his hands at the soft skin of her waist until she gives up a satisfying gasp and a laugh, throwing back her head.

Q has traditionally viewed fucking as a practical act, a way to relieve tension and clear his mind for more interesting pursuits, but this is something he wants, as 007 plays him like poorly constructed code, and it’s all he can do to bite down tighten his fingers at the base of his cock so he doesn’t spill like the overeager boy she so clearly thinks he is. Still, she doesn’t laugh when she guides him inside, a snubbing thrust that takes the breath out of him so his hips jerk forward nervously, as she wraps a leg behind him, painfully tight, skin all around and his mouth bone dry.

She is as taciturn when fucking as she is doing wetwork, only leaving him for a moment--that’s for that bit about getting on the train, Q--before she tightens, wonderful and messy and like clockwork all at once, until he’s seizing everywhere, helplessly scrabbling forward as she cups the back of his head, fingers digging into his hair, hard and then loose, relaxed, and playing with it as he slumps. 

In the office she is as unsinkable as ever, eyes barely cutting to him except during direct briefs. She’s diffident with Mallory and never speaks of M, her M, though there’s no mockery in the way she conducts her current missions. Q resolutely does not blush when she and Eve compare firearms, their hands briefly intertwining over Q’s handiwork. She calls him a boy in front of Mallory, in front of Tanner, in front of the rest of Q branch, but the smile that curls her rather plain mouth when she handles his newest work for her, a sleek thing with minimum recoil and elegant action--that is all satisfaction.


	3. Rats

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which M has more than one deadly stray.

iii. rats

***

When Moneypenny finds the chip in Shanghai, M gives her the go-ahead to continue to Macau, Q in her ear as support. He doesn’t like flying.

Séverine is assuredly the girl at the Modigliani hit. Hair up this time, nails out, shining like stars cast out on a velvet night sky. Pretty then? Q says drily at Moneypenny’s description. If you like that sort of thing, she cuts back. She has a customized firearm strapped to her thigh beneath the slinky dress, a pair of earrings that will broadcast her location if she undoes the studs. Armed, she pronounces Séverine, armed and terrified. A house tattoo on her wrist, old, a tremble to her fingers on the cigarette, newer, hope in her eyes, naked.

“I’m going in,” Moneypenny tells him before cutting the connection. Later, Q is just glad she changed out of the dress before charging off to Silva’s island. He likes his equipment to come back intact.

 

Moneypenny brings in two wayward sons, one from Station H, last active when Q had spots and was busy getting expelled from a very exclusive school, and one from more recent years, missing since an incident in Venice. At a distance, they look oddly similar, tall and golden-haired, with blunt, domineering features and a blade-sharp readiness to their muscles. In separate isolation chambers, Silva is chatty, with a liquid accent and something almost mathematically off with the geography of his features. He tells M that she’s smaller than he remembers, is precisely, calculatedly casual when he’s on his knees recalling months of torture, the burn of the cyanide. Bond is stone roughly cut from a jagged cliffside, nothing to say, nothing to give away in his posture, only his eyes like chipped ice. He’d officially lost 00 status after the Le Chiffre incident--that was when Silva got to him, according to the intel. Silva himself said as much to Moneypenny on his island. Eve, no stranger to firsts, hmm? Well, you aren’t the first agent I stole from her. She’s been a bad mommy, letting you all get hurt. 

Now they are two skeletons come back to claim M. Q tries not to pay attention to departmental politics, but it’s hard to ignore the direction in which the wind is shifting when hearings are being called and his own headquarters are being blown up and subsequently relocated. It’s easy to see what attracted the recruiters to both of them, Silva with a shifting mercurial brilliance, a talent for code that gets under Q’s skin, and Bond his clever hound, a brutal weapon in hand.

In the end, it’s the hound that turns the gun on his master, in front of a dozen ministers at a frozen hearing, Mallory proving his worth, and M poised on the edge of a cliff, taking her dive with only verse as a weapon. Bond is left standing, heaving breath over Silva’s corpse, riddled with an entire clip, and Q cannot stop looking at the vulnerable bit of throat exposed by his unbuttoned collar, how flushed it is with exertion, its stark, red contrast to the impossibly distant ice of his eyes, the compelling charge of his features. 

He turns himself in, wrists up, nothing of submission in his face, and Q thinks, let us see. He has ever appreciated the chance to experiment with a new weapon.


	4. Clockwork

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bond's heart just isn't up to it.

iv. clockwork

***

Q knows his desk officers. They are generally easy to spot: aging, reserved, aloof, or some combination of all three. The agent newly assigned to his unit is the least likely specimen he’s ever been graced with. 

“I heard he used to be 00,” says Eve over drinks. “Ran into some trouble with a rogue, and it took four operations to save him. Now if he pushes that heart too hard, he’s a goner.”

Q raised his brows at that, intrigued by the seeming vulnerability. Looking at him, a slab of muscle and unforgiving features, one could be forgiven for doubting his status as an office ornament. He’s like a bloodhound placed alongside a passel of poodles, lean and deadly and a physical presence that is impossible to ignore, terse to the point of rudeness, but rather scrupulous in all his reports, with a comprehensive knowledge of MI6’s available weaponry that should mildly terrify Q, but instead mildly arouses him. 

The former 007 is a mystery waiting to be unraveled. Orphan, as many of M’s recruits are, a dilapidated estate in Scotland, and an unhappy childhood (also the usual, practically a requirement). Stellar fitness records for the entire length of his active career, and a truly staggering amount of kills. Reports that allude to his propensity for falling into bed with marks, dry things that draw up just short of painting the man with a reproachful scarlet letter. If Q’s math is right, and it always is, Bond must be prodigiously skilled in the bedroom. It is a new project, something he has always liked.

When Silva is captured and then free, it is Bond he goes after first, pressing him against the rough stone wall of the new headquarters, fingertips on the flesh exposed by his collar, hands between the heavily muscled thighs. Q does not catch what he whispers in Bond’s ear, but a week later, he certainly catches it when Bond lands a near impossible throw with a blade entirely unweighted and unsuitable to throw, Silva’s last gasping breaths almost a sonnet to his former comrade. Bond has run across burning fields and escaped from an icy interlude in the local pond. He is only conscious for a few moments longer than Silva before he goes into arrest, the mechanical support for his heart throwing up its hands in surrender at the abuse to which he’s subjected it. Q can imagine the organ itself, tough and full of gristle as its owner, pumping frantically on the grass. 

Q goes himself to the hospital to listen to Bond dictate his brief, on the excuse of technological analysis, but really so he can briefly touch the soft bristle of Bond’s hair, a wiry forearm, a vulnerable wrist.

When Bond is back at work again, impeccably suited as always, Q asks him point blank, “Care to test that thing in a bed?”

They are under sheets after the briefest of pauses, and Bond proves to be as skilled as he had imagined, if more generous of a lover than he’d anticipated. He clings to Q occasionally, in the most unremarkable fashion, as if it were the most casual thing in the world. 

Later, mouthing at Bond’s collarbone, surrounded by warm skin and the shivery intention of hard muscle, Q asks, would you stay? Behind a desk, in this bed, out of the field. Bond says nothing, but Q has seen the life in his eyes when his blood is hot, the cold efficiency with which he can handle a weapon. There is nothing wrong with his analysis precisely, but it is delivered rather limp and colorless, only an echo of his abilities. Some weapons are meant to be used. He chooses to close his eyes and sleep rather than dwell on where this one will end.


End file.
